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Entities in CocosSharp

In this article

The entity pattern is a powerful way to organize game code. It improves readability, makes code easier to maintain, and leverages built-in parent/child functionality.

The entity pattern can improve a developer’s efforts with CocosSharp through improved code organization. This walkthrough will be a hands-on example showing how to create two entities – a Ship entity and a Bullet entity. These entities will be self-contained objects, which means that once instantiated they will automatically be rendered and will perform movement logic as appropriate for their type.

This guide covers the following topics:

Introduction to game entities

General vs. specific entity types

Project setup

Creating entity classes

Adding entity instances to the GameLayer

Reacting to entity logic in the GameLayer

The finished game will look like this:

Introduction to game entities

Game entities are classes that define objects needing rendering, collision, physics, or artificial intelligence logic. Fortunately, the entities present in a game’s code base often match the conceptual objects in a game. When this is true, identifying the entities needed in a game can be more easily accomplished.

These entities would be their own classes in the game, and each instance would require little or no setup beyond instantiation.

General vs. specific entity types

One of the first questions faced by game developers using an entity system is how much to generalize their entities. The most specific of implementations would define classes for every type of entity, even if they differ by few characteristics. More general systems will combine groups of entities into one class, and allow instances to be customized.

For example we can imagine a space game that defines the following classes:

PlayerDogfighter

PlayerBomber

EnemyMissileShip

EnemyLaserShip

A more-generalized approach would be to create a single class for player ships and a single class for enemy ships, which could be configured to support different ship types. Customization may include which image to load, which type of bullet entities to create when shooting, movement coefficients, and AI logic for the enemy ships. In this case the list of entities may be reduced to:

PlayerShip

EnemyShip

Of course, these entity types can be further generalized by allowing per-instance customization for controlling movement. Player ship instances would read from input while enemy ship instances may perform AI logic. This means that the entities could be generalized even further into a single class:

Ship

The generalization can continue even further – a game may use a single base class for all entities. This single class, which may be called GameEntity, would be the class used for every entity instance in the entire game, including entities that are not ships such as bullets and collectible items (power-ups).

This most general of systems is often referred to as a component system. In such a system, game entities can have individual components such as physics, AI, or rendering components added to customize behavior and appearance. Pure component-based systems enable ultimate flexibility and can avoid issues caused by the use of inheritance such as complex inheritance chains. As with other generalizations, effective component systems can be difficult to set up and can reduce the expressiveness of code.

The level of generalization used depends on many considerations, including:

Game size – smaller games can afford to create specific classes, while larger games may be difficult to manage with a large number of classes.

Data driven development – games that rely on data (images, 3D models, and data files such as JSON or XML) may benefit from having generalized entity types, and configuring the specifics based on data. This is especially import for games that expect to add new content during development or after the game has been released.

Game engine patterns – some game engines strongly encourage the usage of component systems while others allow developers to decide how to organize entities. CocosSharp does not require the usage of a component system, so developers are free to implement any type of entity.

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll be using a specific class-based approach with a single ship and bullet entity for this tutorial.

Project setup

Before we begin implementing our entities, we need to create a project. We’ll be using the CocosSharp project templates to simplify project creation. Check this post for information on creating a CocosSharp project from the Visual Studio for Mac templates. The remainder of this guide will use the project name EntityProject.

Once our project is created we’ll set the resolution of our game to run at 480x320. To do this, call CCScene.SetDefaultDesignResolution in the GameAppDelegate.ApplicationDidFinishLaunching method as follows:

Adding content to the project

Once our project has been created, we will add the files contained in this content zip file. To do this, download the zip file and unzip it. Add both ship.png and bullet.png to the Content folder. The Content folder will be inside the Assets folder on Android, and will be at the root of the project on iOS. Once added, we should see both files in the Content folder:

Creating the ship entity

The Ship class will be our game’s first entity. To add a Ship class, first create a folder called Entities at the root level of the project. Add a new class in the Entities folder called Ship:

The first change we’ll make to our Ship class is to let it inherit from the CCNode class. CCNode serves as the base class for common CocosSharp classes like CCSprite and CCLayer, and gives us the following functionality:

Position property for moving the ship around the screen.

Children property for adding a CCSprite.

Parent property, which can be used to attach Ship instances to other CCNodes. We won’t be using this feature in this tutorial; larger games often take advantage of attaching entities to other CCNodes.

AddEventListener method for responding to input for moving the ship.

Schedule method for shooting bullets.

We’ll also add a CCSprite instance so that our ship can be seen on screen:

Why inherit from CCNode instead of CCSprite?

At this point our Ship class is a simple wrapper for a CCSprite instance. Since CCSprite also inherits from CCNode, we could have inherited directly from CCSprite, which would have reduced the code in Ship.cs. Furthermore, inheriting directly from CCSprite reduces the number of in-memory objects and can improve performance by making the dependency tree smaller.

Despite these benefits, we inherited from CCNode to hide some of the CCSprite properties from each instance. For example, the Texture property should not be modified outside of the Ship class, and inheriting from CCNode allows us to hide this property. The public members of our entities become especially important as a game grows larger and as additional developers are added to a team.

Adding input to the ship

Now that our ship is visible on screen we will be adding input. Our approach will be similar to the approach taken in the BouncingGame guide, except that we will be placing the code for movement in the Ship class rather than in the containing CCLayer or CCScene.

Add the code to Ship to support moving it to wherever the user is touching the screen:

Creating the bullet entity

The second entity in our simple game is an entity for displaying bullets. Just like the Ship entity, the Bullet entity will contain a CCSprite so that it appears on screen. The logic for movement differs in that it does not depend on user input for movement; rather, Bullet instances will move in a straight line using velocity properties.

First we’ll add a new class file to our Entities folder and call it Bullet:

Aside from changing the file used for the CCSprite to bullet.png, the code in ApplyVelocity includes movement logic which is based on two coefficients: VelocityX and VelocityY.

The Schedule method allows adding delegates to be called every-frame. In this case we’re adding the ApplyVelocity method so that our bullet moves according to its velocity values. The Schedule method takes an Action<float>, where the float parameter specifies the amount of time (in seconds) since the last frame, which we use to implement time-based movement. Since the time value is measured in seconds, then our velocity values represent movement in pixels per second.

Adding bullets to GameLayer

Before we add any Bullet instances to our game we will make a container, specifically a List<Bullet>. Modify the GameLayer so it includes a list of Bullets:

Next we’ll need to populate the Bullet list. The logic for when to create a Bullet should be contained in the Ship entity, but the GameLayer is responsible for storing the list of Bullets. We will use the factory pattern to allow the Ship entity to create Bullet instances. This factory will expose an event that the GameLayer can handle.

To do this first, we’ll add a folder to our project called Factories, and then add a new class called BulletFactory:

The Ship entity will handle creating Bullet instances – specifically, it will handle how frequently Bullet instances should be created (i.e. how often the bullet is fired), their position, and their velocity.

Modify the Ship entity’s constructor to add a new Schedule call, and then implement this method as follows:

Why GameLayer has ship and bullets members

Our GameLayer class defines two fields to hold references to our entity instances (ship and bullets), but does nothing with them. Furthermore, entities are responsible for their own behavior such as movement and shooting. So why did we add ship and bullets fields to GameLayer?

The reason we added these members is because a full game implementation would require logic in the GameLayer for interaction between the different entities. For example, this game may be further developed to include enemies that can be destroyed by the player. These enemies would be contained in a List in the GameLayer, and logic to test whether Bullet instances collide with the enemies would be performed in the GameLayer as well. In other words, the GameLayer is the root owner of all entity instances, and it is responsible for interactions between entity instances.

Bullet destruction considerations

Our game currently lacks code for destroying Bullet instances. Each Bullet instance has logic for moving on screen, but we haven’t added any code to destroy any off-screen Bullet instances.

Furthermore, the destruction of Bullet instances may not belong in GameLayer. For example, rather than being destroyed when off-screen, the Bullet entity may have logic to destroy itself after a certain amount of time. In this case, the Bullet needs a way to communicate that it should be destroyed to the GameLayer, much like the Ship entity communicated to the GameLayer that a new Bullet was created through the BulletFactory.

The simplest solution is to expand the responsibility of the factory class to support destruction. Then the factory can be notified of an entity instance being destroyed, which can be handled by other objects, such as the GameLayer removing the entity instance from its lists.

Summary

This guide shows how to create CocosSharp entities by inheriting from the CCNode class. These entities are self-contained objects, handling creation of their own visuals and custom logic. This guide designates code that belongs inside an entity (movement and creation of other entities) from code that belongs in the root entity container (collision and other entity interaction logic).